Hillary Decides What is Top
Secret, What's Not

By Jonathan F. Keiler
AmericanThinker.com

Hillary
Clinton and her campaign minions are trying mightily
to dismiss the conclusions of the intelligence
community inspector general thathighly
classifiedSpecial
Access Protocol (SAP) documents were transferred to
Clinton’s unsecured private server. The first line
of Clinton’s defense is (as usual) that the
allegations are 1)nothing
newand
2)politically
motivated. But beyond this usual rote Clintonian
response is the additional claim that the documents
were also 1)not
so classifiedwhen
Clinton received them and 2) even if they were
classified documents the information they contained
waspublic
knowledge anyway, so no harm, no foul.

As to
Clinton’s first line of defense, what can one say?
You support Hillary and accept her mendacious
paranoia as part of the package, or you don’t. That
Charles McCollough (the IG) isan
Obama appointeeconfirmed
by a Democrat Senate, thus making the charge of that
his actions are political even more absurd than
usual, matters not to Clintonistas for whom truth
and logic are inconveniences.

The first
part of Clinton’s second line of defense is of the
bend but don’t break variety. Hillary first denied
that any classified documents were sent or received
over her server. When that proved patently false,
she fell back and claimed that such documents were
not so marked at the time, so how could she know?
That this is not a legal defense under the
applicable statutes doesn’t matter to the Clinton
gang, it sounds okay, so go with it. At least one
email reveals that Hillaryinstructed
an aideto
delete classified markings on a document and send it
on an unsecure machine. But hey, when Hillary
actually received it was not marked classified, so
she was not lying about that, only breaking the law,
and that’s just something that Clintons, from time
to time, do.

And finally we get to the real
interesting part, the last line of Clinton’s
defense, that even if the documents were classified
at the highest level, it was all a mistake. The
information in the documents -- reportedly about the
American drone strike program -- was public
knowledge anyway, so whoever classified the
documents didn’t know what they were doing.

Now
let’s take this position to its logical conclusion,
which if applied across the board in the
intelligence community or the military, anybody
handling a sensitive document could determine on
their own whether the document should be classified
or not. “Oh sure” an Air Force officer might say “I
posted a schematic of a new radar for the F-35 on my
personal blog, but I hear the Chinese already have
it anyway, so it’s really not classified. Please
take off the handcuffs.”

An apologiafor
Clinton’s actions on Media Matters citing various
anonymous “government officials” basically attempts
to explain why the SAP classified material was not
really classified at all, and so nothing to get
excited about. Since the drone strike program was
already widely reported in the media, including the
New YorkTimes(as
Mrs. Clinton pointed out the other day on NPR) how
could documents relating to that possibly be
secret?

Well in fact, there are several
reasons that the documents may have been highly
classified regardless of the actual information
contained within them. The first and most important
is sources and methods. Many years ago I worked as
an Intelligence Clerk in what was then called the
State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research
(BIR), Department of Soviet Internal Affairs. My job
was basically to go through thousands of
intelligence cables that came into the office every
day, and pick out the few that were relevant to my
department’s mission, to discern what was happening
in the top echelons of the Soviet government. I
looked at a lot of classified stuff, and ended up
rejecting and burning about 90% of it. Almost all of
the information in those thousands of classified
documents was quite mundane. Often stuff you might
read in the newspapers -- and in fact newspapers
from the Soviet Union and elsewhere were a part of
my daily intel trove. The reason why the documents
were classified usually had to do with where they
came from and how we got them, not what the
documents said. Divulging that information could not
only endanger sources but lives, and so is quite
serious business.

Now the Media Matters article
says that at least one of the two documents that
were SAP marked did not come from confidential
sources or methods, while the other -- well they
can’t say so they just sort of mumble that part
away. If even one of those documents came from a
secure source or method, that is quite
consequential, for most people handcuff time.

But let’s
assume that neither document originated with
confidential sources or methods. Why might the
intelligence community still highly classify the
documents when the information contained in them
about U.S. drone strikes was “public knowledge?”
Well, because the U.S. still does not officially
acknowledge the drone program, and an official
document that does is by its very nature secret. Now
Hillary or her supporters might think it is
ridiculous that President Obama does not wish to
publicly acknowledge this program, but that is
really not their decision to make, is it? Hillary
worked directly for the president, and if he and his
national security team deemed that having some level
of deniability for the drone program was important,
even if reporters for the New YorkTimeshad
already figured out that American drones were
killing bad guys, then on what authority does
Hillary ignore that?

Did
Hillary go to the president first and say “Hey
Barack, why are we denying this drone program when
everybody knows you have adisposition
matrixand
knock these guys off once in awhile? Let’s
declassify the whole thing.” That would have been
okay, and then the president could have said yes or
no. But Hillary didn’t do that, so far as we
know. She and her aides just decided -- after the
fact -- that this stuff was not worthy of
classification so passing it around on an unsecured
private email account was perfectly acceptable.

Now way back when I was at BIR
we might have gotten an embassy cable that said
something like “Brezhnev and Andropov disagree over
Soviet policy in Poland.” That might have been
something that a prominent reporter (like the lateJoseph
Kraftwho
sometimes quietly stopped by the office to chat withmy
boss) might have already known. But were he to
see the classified cable because I had carelessly
left it out on a desk, even assuming that the source
and method was benign, he would know that this was
something that concerned U.S. diplomats which if
reported would be known to the Soviets. And while
that might not have been disastrous, it would not be
something we’d wish to share. Not to mention I would
have been fired and likely sent to jail. Like
Hillary should be.